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To phrase things delicately, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in King v. Burwell and Obergefell v. Hodges are unequivocally horrendous. Legal textualists and political conservatives will remember these majority opinions as among the worst of the twenty-first century. While Kelo v. New London and NFIB v. Sebelius were equally despicable, these cases at least were…

Friends of democracy and the rule of law will remember King v. Burwell as one of the worst cases in recent memory. However, every cloud does indeed have its silver lining, today taking the form of a devastating dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia. While the dissent is worth reading in its entirety, below are ten of his…

This issue will find you mired in exams in what is doubtless one of the more stressful stretches of your year. And of course in the following weeks you will be lost on a beach somewhere for dead week and then back on campus for graduation and reunions and then on your way to your…

February 28th, 2015. Senior Night for the fourteenth-ranked Princeton women’s basketball team. The Tigers were aiming to set a new single-season wins mark versus the Brown Bears just one night after head coach Courtney Banghart set a program record for coaching wins. Going for their 27th straight victory, the Tigers started their four seniors who were…

It is no secret that in the United States today, single motherhood has become increasingly common. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 12 million single-parent households in 2014 —over 80 percent of which were headed by single mothers. This phenomenon has already sparked widespread discussion centered on the economic hardships of these mothers,…

This spring, Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR) will be once again be asking Princeton’s administration to take a stand in favor of increased access to higher education by ceasing to consider the criminal histories of prospective students in making admissions decisions. The initiative at Princeton—the Admissions Opportunity Campaign—is part of an emerging campaign…

On April 5, 1986, Lehigh University student Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her dormitory by a fellow student who was in the process of robbing her. He had entered the dormitory through unlocked doors, a common occurrence in the days before campus crime statistics were reported. There was a national outcry against the…

“If you want to see how the free market really works, this is the place to come.” Milton Friedman thus declared Hong Kong’s proudest boast, paying homage to what future commentators would deem the world’s freest economy. It all began with Sir John Cowperthwaite, a British civil servant who was commissioned as colonial Hong Kong’s…

Over the doorway beneath McCosh arch, there is an inscription that reads: “Here we were taught by men and gothic towers democracy and faith and righteousness and love of unseen things that do not die.” I wonder if, a century from now, a similar inscription will grace the concrete slabs inside the arches of Bloomberg…

As the campaign to redefine marriage to include same-sex unions has swelled and is now awaiting an announcement from the Supreme Court in June, the laws of only a few states (fifteen as of this writing) have maintained the traditional view of marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. In recent months,…

Judith Shulevitz perhaps suspected that her piece “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas,” published 21 March in the New York Times, would briefly make her the darling of conservatives. The op-ed undertakes a brief study of how the spread of the doctrine of “safe spaces,” where students are sheltered from “being ‘bombarded’ by discomfiting…

Religious freedom is a classical liberal right. It is, in fact, the first right, enshrined in our Constitution from the opening sentence of the First Amendment. Yet even with this strong pedigree, religious freedom has often been, and remains to this day, contentious. As any good historian will tell you, the naïve image of the…

Recently, rumors have surfaced regarding the implementation of systems through which students can anonymously report professors and preceptors for comments that they deem offensive and discriminatory. Articles published in The Daily Princetonian posit that a system proposed by the Council of the Princeton University Community would publish reports of discrimination. According to The Daily Princetonian,…

Rabbi Eitan Webb founded the Chabad House at Princeton in 2002 and currently serves as its director. Rabbi Webb has been a University-recognized chaplain since 2007 and serves on the board of directors of the Chabad on Campus International Foundation. As part of our examination of campus religious life, the Princeton Tory’s Mikhael Smits sits…

It is hard to believe that a new cohort of admitted students will soon be visiting campus for Princeton Preview and hopefully joining us next fall. I imagine their Freshman Orientation will be, as mine was, a blur of activities highlighting important aspects of Princeton’s culture and values. As the post-Orientation survey suggested, the Opening…

Finally, the season is turning from winter to spring. Soon, the tulips will be poking up through the mulch in Prospect Garden. The northern magnolias will begin to blossom along University Place. It will be a time of constant gentle breezes and the rebirth of green. This is the wonderful thing about the seasons: each…

There is something satisfying about coming full circle. The first and only full article I’ve written for the Tory was about the virtue of humility at Princeton. Now I’d like to bring my tenure as Publisher to a close with the same topic for this letter. This choice is not just a neat way to…